It's a Disaster

Boston and San Francisco have both learned disaster preparedness the hard way in the last year. Hospitals in each city had their own challenges. After the recent plane crash in San Francisco, many Chinese and Korean translators were urgently needed, as were government customs officers (as the passengers had obviously not cleared customs before the crash). In Boston, large numbers of patients arrived so quickly, they couldn't be registered appropriately, causing treatment delays due to the electronic medical record. Many patients also arrived without identification; a rescuer picked up a purse believing it belonged to a patient being transported to the hospital, although it actually belonged to a woman who was killed, leading to a family receiving the wrong information about the survival of their loved one. Both organizations cited disaster drills as helping prepare them for the worst.